权益分类	功能权益	普通用户	{{item.name}}会员
{{category.name}}	{{benefitItem.name}}

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Behavioral and Computational Investigation of Transitivity in the Acquisition of Non-Basic Syntax

博士论文研究：非基本语法习得中及物性的行为和计算研究

基本信息

批准号：
1827709
负责人：
Jeffrey Lidz
金额：
$ 1.57万
依托单位：
University of Maryland, College Park
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2018
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2018-07-01 至 2020-06-30
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1827709&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Doctoral Dissertation Research Behavioral Computational

项目摘要

Within the first years of life and without explicit instruction, children acquire a linguistic system that allows them to combine sounds in order to express meanings. Studying this process illuminates how a cognitive system as complicated as language can develop in the human mind, and helps clarify the nature of learning in development. Learning in general requires building on prior knowledge: children can't learn arithmetic if they don't know how to count. This project asks how infants build on their prior linguistic knowledge at each stage of their development, using the limited amount of speech they are able to understand, in order to learn more about the structure of their language. By improving our understanding of how infants learn about their language at each stage in development, the project provides an important step toward understanding why and how the quantity and type of speech heard in infancy contribute to differences in children's later vocabulary and language performance, in school and later in life.This research focuses on the acquisition of "non-basic" clauses as a window into the incremental nature of language learning. Sentences like "What did Mary fix?" are potentially misleading for children in the earliest stages of syntax acquisition, who might not recognize that "what" stands for the object of "fix" and might think that this clause is intransitive. This work pursues the hypothesis that children may use knowledge about verb argument structure in order to identify non-basic clause types in their language. The research integrates approaches from different research communities, using behavioral experiments to investigate the developmental trajectory of non-basic clause acquisition, and computational modelling to evaluate whether the proposed mechanisms are feasible for learning from child-directed speech. Through this case study, this research aims to provide a fuller picture of what portion of the input is useful to an individual child at any single point in development, how children perceive that input given their current grammatical knowledge, and what internal mechanisms enable them to generalize beyond that input in inferring the grammar of their language. The project also includes outreach about issues in language development to local families and high school students from under-represented backgrounds.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在生命的最初几年里，没有明确的指导，儿童获得了一个语言系统，使他们能够联合收割机的声音，以表达的意义。研究这一过程可以阐明像语言这样复杂的认知系统是如何在人类头脑中发展的，并有助于澄清发展中学习的本质。一般来说，学习需要建立在先验知识的基础上：如果孩子不知道如何数数，他们就不能学习算术。这个项目询问婴儿如何在他们发展的每个阶段建立他们以前的语言知识，使用他们能够理解的有限数量的语音，以了解更多关于他们语言的结构。通过提高我们对婴儿在每个发展阶段如何学习语言的理解，该项目为理解婴儿期听到的言语的数量和类型为什么以及如何有助于儿童后期词汇和语言表现的差异迈出了重要的一步，本研究的重点是“非基本”从句的习得，这是了解语言学习渐进性的一个窗口。像“玛丽修了什么？“可能会误导处于句法习得早期阶段的儿童，他们可能不认识“what”代表“fix”的宾语，并可能认为该从句是不及物的。本研究的假设是，儿童可能会使用动词论元结构的知识，以确定他们的语言中的非基本子句类型。本研究整合了不同研究领域的方法，使用行为实验来研究非基本从句习得的发展轨迹，并使用计算模型来评估所提出的机制是否适用于儿童指导言语的学习。通过这个案例研究，本研究的目的是提供一个更全面的图片输入的哪一部分是有用的一个单独的孩子在任何一个单一的发展点，儿童如何看待输入给他们目前的语法知识，以及什么内部机制，使他们能够概括超出输入推断他们的语言的语法。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。